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Ingemar Hedenius

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Ingemar Hedenius (1908–1982) was a Swedish philosopher, professor of practical philosophy at Uppsala from 1947 to 1973, and the leading public intellectual of post-war Swedish secularism. Within the vault he matters as the principal defender of Axel Hägerström’s value theory during the “crisis of democracy” debate: he answered the charge that the theory prepared the ground for totalitarianism by insisting that a descriptive theory cannot form the foundation for any morality, destructive ones included.1 His Tro och vetande (1949) triggered the largest religious controversy in twentieth-century Sweden.

Career

Hedenius was born in Stockholm on 5 April 1908, son of the physician Israel Hedenius and grandson of the Uppsala pathology professor Per Hedenius. He studied at Uppsala and took his doctorate at Lund in 1936 on Berkeley’s sensationalism and theology, followed by Studies in Hume’s Ethics (1937). Docent of practical philosophy at Uppsala from 1938, he was appointed professor in 1947 and held the chair until 1973, with guest professorships in Århus, Åbo, Detroit, and Nairobi. He died in Uppsala on 30 April 1982.2

Defending value nihilism

When Hägerström died in 1939, Hedenius moved quickly into the vacant position as the theory’s leading proponent. He defended it against Ernst Cassirer in Theoria, wrote a series of semi-popular articles in the Social Democratic journal Tiden 1940–1942, and gathered some of them as Om rätt och moral (1941). Strang notes that the theory he defended was technically closer to Ayer’s and Carnap’s emotivism than to Hägerström’s act-psychological version — but by ascribing it to Hägerström and adopting the pejorative label “value nihilism,” Hedenius made the legacy his own.1

The central exchange came when the Social Democratic MP Anders Örne charged that the Uppsala philosophy formed “a theoretical foundation for the advance of the modern totalitarian states,” and that the consistent value nihilist must regard the Finns fighting for their freedom as staking their lives on sheer superstition. Hedenius’s reply separated the causal from the logical claim. It would be crazy to suggest that Hägerström had caused the political developments in Italy, Germany, and Russia; and as a matter of logic, the theory cannot found a destructive morality because its basic idea is that a scientific theory cannot form the foundation for any morality at all. The practical nihilist’s conclusion that “everything is allowed” is itself a valuation, and therefore meaningless on the theory’s own terms.1 In the 1949 anthology Nordisk demokrati, edited by Hal Koch and Alf Ross, his essay “Filosofiska skäl för demokratien” completed the position: no facts about reality can give logically compelling proof that anything is valuable in itself, so the philosophical case for democracy ends in an appeal to “for us” — to values the Nordic peoples in fact share.1

Tro och vetande and after

Tro och vetande (1949) extended the same intellectual morality to religion. Against the theology of the Church of Sweden Hedenius formulated three postulates a discipline must meet to count as rational inquiry, argued that theology violates all three, and drew the maxim that one should not believe anything for which there are no reasonable grounds to hold it true. The ensuing hedeniusdebatten ran for years through the daily press, and its long-run effect was to push Swedish theology toward a descriptive, confessionally neutral study of religion.3 Within the realist circle he also played the internal critic: he attacked Karl Olivecrona’s pro-German pamphlet England eller Tyskland (1940) for its theoretical and poorly reality-adjusted views.4 Late in life he wrote the biography of his friend Herbert Tingsten (1974) and returned to the problem of human dignity in Om människovärde (1982).

Hedenius in the vault

The Scandinavian Value Nihilists is the vault’s account of his role in the debate, and Value nihilism carries his two decisive distinctions: between a science of morals and a scientific morals, and between a theory that justifies nothing and a theory that justifies power. He is the clearest case against reading value nihilism as politically quietist: the same premises that denied democracy a metaphysical foundation grounded his lifelong, combative defense of secular and democratic culture.

  1. The Scandinavian Value Nihilists (Johan Strang, NORDEUROPAforum 2009); saved copy. ↩↩↩↩

  2. “Hedenius, P A Ingemar,” Vem är det 1981, p. 419, runeberg.org/vemardet/1981/0439.html; dates confirmed by sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingemar_Hedenius. ↩

  3. “Tro och vetande,” Signum article archive, signum.se/artikelarkiv/tro-och-vetande. ↩

  4. Kjell Å. Modéer, “K H Karl Olivecrona,” Svenskt biografiskt lexikon band 28, sok.riksarkivet.se/sbl/Artikel/7722. ↩

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